Cyclic olefin copolymers (“COC's”) can be broadly defined as polyolefins with cyclic olefin comonomers. Conventionally, and more specifically, COC's may refer to ethylene-norbornene copolymers. Most of the commercial COC's are amorphous and linear, with 40 mol % or more norbornene-derived comonomer unit concentrations. Typically COC's have high use-temperatures which make them ideal in optical applications, and applications requiring high stiffness and strength, as well as excellent moisture barrier and polar chemical resistance. However, traditional COC's suffer from poor toughness, insufficient oxygen barrier abilities, oil resistance, and difficulty in processing the neat resins. In particular, the poor miscibility of amorphous COC's with most of the polyolefins, which are typically semi-crystalline, also limits the broader applications and value proposition in blends and composites. One commercial example of a COC is manufactured and sold as Topas™ E-140 copolymer, which is a semi-crystalline elastomeric COC that retained the good optical properties of amorphous COC's and additionally gave rise to elasticity and improved toughness. However, the commercial semi-crystalline elastomeric COC has some limitations, such as the requirement of a certain tubing wall thickness to maintain kink resistance in tubing applications, as well as poor processability.
Relevant disclosures include U.S. Pat. No. 3,984,610; U.S. Pat. No. 5,498,677; U.S. Pat. No. 5,552,504; U.S. Pat. No. 5,621,054; U.S. Pat. No. 6,180,123; U.S. Pat. No. 6,384,162; U.S. Pat. No. 6,458,919; US 2010/105851; US 2011/021731; US 2011/256373; US 2012/258326; US 2014/162041; JP 2003/313247; and KR 2004/0065110, as well as:                S.-P. Rwei et al., “Investigation on the spinnability of metallocene cyclic olefins copolymer melt,” in 82(4) TEXTILE RESEARCH J. 315-323 (2012);        D. Dai et al., “Characterization of structure and properties of metallocene-catalyzed cycloolefin copolymer and development of fiber therefrom,” in 34(4) HECHENG XIANWEI GONGYE 34-36 (2011); and        K. Thorshuag et al., “Poly(ethylene-co-norbornene) obtained with a constrained geometry catalyst. A study of reaction kinetics and copolymer properties,” in 33 MACROMOLECULES 2903-2911 (2002).        